← Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
From Lyft to Climate Tech: Raj’s Journey of Innovation & Impact
00:42:50
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- [00:01]
A
Why don't I actually try to invest in things that are going to make a difference rather than just create games? Because I think I'm better at that. And I went to talk to the founders of Lyft and they said we have a big vision to reduce emissions and also to make cities better. And what it involves is the future is all about self driving, electric, shared vehicle, foreign.
- [00:32]
B
This episode is brought to you by the outstanding team at Compass Strategic Advisors, your trusted partner in driving strategic growth. Whether it's expanding into new territories, launching products, rebranding, or hiring key staff and board members, they offer the expert guidance every step of the way. With a versatile approach and a proven track record, Compass is the go to resource for both startups and established companies looking to scale with confidence. Thanks and show your support for this podcast by sharing some sponsor appreciation. Check these guys out at bww.compass-strategic-advisors.com well, hey Raj, it's great to have you on the liftoff. I love the topic that we're going to dig into right now, but first I got to give props to our friend Dave Unstuck Hirsch, who. Who then brought us together. And yeah, Dave was a former guest on the podcast. We had a wonderful conversation about getting Unstuck and talking his new book. Of course. He knows how to promote as well as anybody, right?
- [01:31]
A
Yeah, he does.
- [01:32]
B
He Reignition, transformation, startups, all that good stuff. So it's a great book. I love the read. And were you in it? I forget.
- [01:41]
A
I was. Yeah. There's a story there about what I had to deal with when I was selling FitMob to Class Pass, and so that story is something he wanted to capture.
- [01:53]
B
Yeah. So your background is an entrepreneur. Legendary. You did Fit Mob, you did Snapfish, you did Lyft as a. As a strategy officer. Chief Strategy, Yeah.
- [02:03]
A
I was the first VC in that and then I joined full time. So it was a weird thing. We're going from being the board member to working for the CEO.
- [02:12]
B
Yeah, I think that's fascinating. There's so much going on with Lyft. We could talk about that. I've had them on the podcast also. But I enjoy your switch from tech over to climate. A lot of people have looked at it and get involved in it, but it's also one of those areas like life science or med tech, that you're scared to dive into it because it's such a huge and expansive field. But you're the co founder, the managing partner at Climactic, and I love the fact you combine Your tech experience now and trying to apply it to, oh, just figuring out this little crisis we call climate and global warming and all that. What led you to make that leap?
- [02:58]
A
So it was back in the, I would say the mid 2000s. I was attending the TED conference and there on stage, whereas a person I've respected for a long time in venture capital, he's a partner at Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr, the original investor in Google and Amazon.
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B
Legendary.
- [03:16]
A
Yeah, legendary guy. And he was on stage and he was on stage with his friend Al Gore, who everyone knows. And Al presented his famous presentation of Inconvenient Truth. And that was based on that and went through the crisis that we're in. And then John brought his daughter on stage and he started to cry. And it was true, it wasn't like a made up thing. And he said, you know, this is the biggest crisis we face and we're leaving this to our, to our children. And for me, that was just a huge wake up call to do something about it. And so from there, John did something really interesting. Usually someone gives a TED Talk and they just go away. You think about it. Yeah. And what he did is he said that day, four o', clock, I want you, if you care about this, to join me in a smaller auditorium and everyone is going to share what their ideas are and we're going to help you make it happen. I was like, wow. And I had an idea. This was in the time of Facebook, social games, etc, and I thought one of the problems, and this was back in mid 2000, you know, like 2007 or 2008, was that there's just not enough awareness of what's going on and awareness of what our impact is. And what I ended up doing was, hey, why don't we create a social game? Kind of like SimCity, except a simulated environment is a habitat of really cute animals. And if you take real world actions with your camera phone and back then it wasn't the iPhone, you bring input those into the game and the habitat stays safe. And if you don't, things bad things start to happen. So you can kind of show the time cycle happening in a much more rapid scale. Because we have a frog in the boiling water problem where it feels like it's okay, but it's slowly getting bad. So I threw out that idea. And then since I threw it out, I was like, oh, I got to act on it. So I went out to a nonprofit that helped me, that Reid Hoffman actually introduced me to, and they helped me raise a half a Million dollars from the epa, which right now is gutted, but back then cared about awareness. And I raised a half a million for this game. And I got some great product managers from a top company in Silicon Valley called Zynga, which a friend, Mark Pincus started. And, and we launched it and it didn't work. People played the game online, but they didn't really take the actions. Right.
- [05:57]
B
For people that don't know Zynga, Zing is a popular gaming company, mostly, you know, animated.
- [06:06]
A
I, I mean I've social games and then mobile games. Yeah, yeah. And so went public, worth billions. Anyway, I, after that it was a bit disheartening. Then I kind of scratched my head and said why don't I actually try to invest in things that are going to make a difference rather than just create games because I think I'm better at that. And so when I was at Mayfield I was a managing director there. There's another two guys that were there that had an interest in clean tech. And the time it was clean tech because it was about energy, whereas now it's climate tech. Every industry needs to decarbonize. Back then it was the energy industry. And so we looked at it together and decided that we should take a capital light approach. We're not great at investing in like new silicon wafers and I think we judge that correctly that China won that game. But what are the other parts of the value chain that we could play? Yeah, and, and I was like, you know, I'm really going to do this because there is no crisis, in my opinion, more dire and more difficult. So there's lots of things that come up, like we have inequality, we have, there's reproductive rights. They're all very important, but you can change them. This one is irreversible. Like the damage that we're doing is forever. And it's impacting generations upon generations. It's not flip flopping policy. And it was also just difficult because one person taking an action doesn't mean much. One country taking an action doesn't mean much. So I thought it's such a gnarly problem, I got to work on it. And so we ended up looking at different ways to invest. And one of the things we looked at was, oh, solar panels are going to happen, but they need to. What can we do to make that faster? The adoption? And what we found was that the financing of it was a challenge. And there was a startup called SolarCity that came out with a new way of doing financing and we invested in them and then later on it became part of Tesla. You know, now it's part of Tesla Solar. We looked at another one in Demand Response. It's called Sea Power, which was the idea of an enterprise consumes a lot of energy if they shut down the lights when they're not using it or lower the H vac when they're not and use software to do that, you can say, and everyone wins. And we did that smaller exit, but it still worked. And then I looked at transportation. I said, look, that's inefficient. And it's not just about climate, it's also about congestion. There's too many cars in the road and 75 to 80% of cars have one passenger. Why don't. And the idea that I was thinking about was, isn't there a startup out there that can use the power of a marketplace and connect people that want to ride with people that are riding? And so my friends at Carnegie Mellon, Manu Kumar, who started K9 Ventures, connected me to this little startup called Zimride and another guy, Mike Maples, Floodgate vc had done the seed investment and they were looking for a proper VC Series A. So I met the company. I really liked the founders, John and Logan, and I invested and led that round. And they had been rejected quite a bit. And it was. And I was like, well, look, I don't know if this model work, but there's something here around making transportation inefficient, efficient. And that's one of the key things about it being a VC is whatever you typically invest in is not what ends up being successful, but what you're betting on is the team and the general opportunity. And a really good team is going to kind of zig and zag to kind of get there.
- [09:40]
B
Figure it out.
- [09:41]
A
They'll figure it out. And so what we ended up doing at Lyft then was it was actually Zimride. We weren't getting a lot of traction on the ride board because we couldn't get people to pay. And. And if you. And it was not. Didn't feel real time because using the web, so it was more about like college campuses and enterprises and doing commutes and doing I'm going home for the holidays and all that. But it wasn't a very everyday use case. So we had a hackathon to come up with different ideas and someone created the concept of, hey, why don't we allow someone with a car to use their car to give someone else a ride in real time and let's make a mobile app Rather than it being a website. And that was the beginning of Lyft. At the time there was Uber Black, but there wasn't this concept of peer to peer ride sharing. And so that's. And so we launched out of this hack. There were 25 people in the company. Most of them, everyone was focused on the other business. And we saw the demand like the day we launched, like 10 times greater than what we thought.
- [10:43]
B
Wow, that's interesting. I didn't know that.
- [10:45]
A
So one of the biggest moves that they made, which is a lesson, is that when you're faced with a new opportunity, but you have like, let's. There's a significant over 7 digit million business that they had, but it was just wasn't growing fast. Usually the teams make the mistake of just putting a few people on the new thing and you got to kind of keep it managing it. They made the bold move and told us in the board and said we're going to take everyone except two people off that whole business. And. And we're like, well, it's not legal. Yeah. And we all talked as a board and we said, all right, well let's take the risk that we can change the rules if we show that there's scenario.
- [11:25]
B
You were betting kind of on the team and kind of on the market size or potential. Because the market potential wasn't obvious.
- [11:34]
A
Yeah, the market potential was not obvious in that moment. And so we were betting on the fact that there was early demand for this. And what. And then, you know, John Zimmer was a master consumer marketer. Yeah. And he was like, this could go viral if we put something crazy on the cars because taxis are yellow. And he said, let's put a pink mustache. And so he put it so all the beginning cars of Lyft had a pink mustache. And everyone would look in the street and say, what the hell is this? Pink mustache. Yeah.
- [12:03]
B
Yeah.
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A
And it got very viral. And of course it was cheaper than Uber Black. And the first thing Uber did, which is not very well known, is that they tried to shut us down and said this is illegal. Which is ironic. Sure. And then when they realized that the demand for this thing was big, they started UberX and they tried to buy.
- [12:21]
B
You at some point it lift and.
- [12:23]
A
All that other that happened later. Yeah. So UberX, you know, so. And then I started spending a day of the week there because I was like, wow, this thing is really working and I want to help these guys. And then I realized I really love being an entrepreneur again. And that's where I Left Mayfield and started Fit Mob, which then later merged into Class Pass. So I took a detour from climate. Yeah, because it was about health. And then after merging fit mob with ClassPass, which is a story in and of itself, I took a step back and relooked at climate and said, we've moved from awareness to we need to take action. And this was 2016 and I had this idea of maybe I start a venture fund that helps urbanization happen with less carbon footprint, because urbanization is a huge trend. Stanford had a whole center on it that I was spending time at. I went to talk to the founders of Lyft and they said we have a big vision to reduce emissions and also to make cities better. And what it involves is the future is all about a self driving electric shared vehicle. And so Lyft needs to move from this peer to peer model to actually executing on that other model. And can you come and lead that effort as the chief strategy officer while we focus on the core business? I was like, wow, that's amazing. The other piece of it was that I was a robotics major at Carnegie Mellon. I graduated in 1992 and worked on some of the first robots that were autonomous. And we had a self driving van, but there was no industry for it in 92. Like there were no jobs. That's why I worked in telecom, which turned into Internet. So I was like, wow, I can kind of revisit this. And so we hired this incredible technical wizard from Google who was doing Street View at Google and he was convinced he could create the what like Waymo was doing all over again for Lyft. And so we hired hundreds of engineers in Palo Alto. And the big difference was that I learned everything about AI and deep learning, because it was all about deep learning and how to make it work. And we stood up to autonomous cars that were driving through Palo Alto. San Francisco pandemic hit in 2020 and we had to pull back our plans because it was about survival. And at that point I was contacted by Lauren Jobs firm called Emerson Collective. And they were big into climate and they had said, hey, we're thinking about going deeper as into venture in climate. You did venture and you understand operating at Lyft. And Lyft had gone public and I was part of the executive team and it was an amazing run for four years. So I went and learned that clean tech had turned into climate tech and that there's a really huge opportunity here that is massive. Like bigger than potentially what even happened in digitization. It's the decarbonization of the world, but it's harder because it's about atoms and bits, not just bits. And so the job wasn't a great fit. But my buddy Josh Felser called me up and said, hey. And he was also running a venture fund. He said, I want to go full time into climate. You want to join me? And I was like, let's do it. And climactic was born.
- [15:41]
B
Wow, great story. I love that founder stories, but particularly this one, because it had so much switching back and forth, ultimately driven by a passion that you had that you kind of put on the sidelines for a little bit. But that's life, right? You gotta.
- [15:53]
A
Yeah.
- [15:53]
B
You know, seize the moment. It's not always a gradual or evolutionary thing. Sometimes you just have to, you know, slam on the gas.
- [16:02]
A
There is beautiful. Alan Watts YouTube video I was watching yesterday where he says that the suffering that's caused by humanity is that we have a direction and we want the world to be in line with whatever we want and we think we can control the world and you cannot. And so it's not about not doing anything. It's about setting a direction, but then allowing life to flow. And that's really what like, pivoting a company is about. If you're rigid and said, no, my idea is going to work no matter what, and. And the signs are showing that it's not there, you'll be suffering, you know, versus, oh, there's a different direction we could go. Let's go that direction and try it out. Oh, there's a setback. How do we get over the setback? So really powerful lessons that apply to personal life as well as to business life. Yeah.
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B
So how many companies is in your portfolio?
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A
There's about 20. 20.
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B
Wow. And so the category of climate is. I'm imagining there are thousands of startup companies in the space, and I imagine they all kind of deal with some level of what I've heard referred to as a poly crisis. This, this confluence of all kinds of issues. Right. From economic to technological to the actual climate. You talk about the issues and the geopolitical issues about trying to harness and get everybody on board because one country does something great that doesn't necessarily change the, the, the climate around the world. So, yeah, how are you instructing people with your vast experience and knowledge, how are you instructing people to, to drive their companies and not get, not get like bummed out at all these social challenges, political challenges, and just the upheaval, but navigate them successfully?
- [17:51]
A
Yeah. So this is one of the Biggest challenges we face. We had San Francisco Climate Week. We had one of our strategic partners that's part of our fund is Van Jones. You may have heard of him, he's on CNN a lot. Yeah, he. What's not as well known is that he was one of the first people in the Trump administration in the first term that got a bipartisan bill passed around prison reform. Oh, and he's a Democrat.
- [18:20]
B
Back when I watched CNN in those days.
- [18:23]
A
Yeah. And very few people watch it now, so you're not alone. But what he had said was, I'm a voracious Democrat until the election's over and then whoever's in power, I am purple and I'm going to work with them because I just want to get shit done that I care about. And so what he spoke to our entrepreneurs and founders that were very downtrodden and they're still. And it's even worse because of the IRA getting gutted now officially. And his point was, it's like what we just talked about with you don't control the outside world. So when you see that the signs are changing, how do you retool? And he retooled to get that prison reform done. And part of the retooling is language. So the goal is still the same. So we got them, unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever you want to look at it, we got to move from neutral language to masculine language. We got to move to energy dominance from green energy. So we got to find words that open the tent and let everyone in something.
- [19:35]
B
Something a little more compelling than drill, baby, drill.
- [19:39]
A
Yeah, well, that's the other side. But the other side of like getting people. And his point was like, look, part of the reason why we lost the election was that there's a lot of shame going, going towards the typical, let's just say white Midwestern male that's 35 or 40 who sees his condition going down. So the last thing he's really thinking about is climate right now. It's about survival, it's about jobs, it's about security of the family and all that. And of course, there's fear mongering that happens in politics that play to that quite well. So his point was put it in words. So change the language of what's there, utilize the new set of rules to figure out how to retool and go after it. But the most fundamental thing to hold onto is that the economics are in our favor. It's not like solar and wind don't work. It's not like batteries don't Work, they work. And yes, there's going to be less incentive now, but it's just about really focusing harder. So for example, we have a company that's a marketplace that connects large enterprises that have many buildings to figure out which one should they put solar and battery on their roof because it's a better economic deal than going to utility. Right. With all those incentives. There's a huge number, you know, that worked out because they're incentives now with the incentives that are going to be going away, basically maybe 30 to 40% of them work. So you double down now. So how do you get to those faster? How do you build a solid business on that? How do you not over expend your overhead? So because you're not going to have the, the other percentage that are not going to come on board at least the next couple years in doing it then the other thing is just other facts that we know. One fact that we know is hey there is if natural gas, you know, yeah, great. Our country has a lot of it and we're going to have a huge energy problem partially because of AI, partially because we're just increasing our energy use per capita and there's a 90 month delay on gas turbines. We can't solve the pro like go for it, try to build, you know, and you're going to be launching in 90 months. We can do solar and batteries today. And you need batteries too because you need to store the power because it's intermittent. So there are solutions that are going to happen that are a necessity versus it being Republican or Democrat. And so it's about hanging around the hoop until the shots clear.
- [22:14]
B
I've heard lots of talk about making data centers more energy efficient too and some steps along that way. Some things being done with nuclear that are also compelling. What are you looking at right now? What has your interest? I don't know if you're building theses for startup companies or searching out for certain topics, but give me a sense of what's what, what's getting your attention today in terms of the new ideas.
- [22:39]
A
So we take a step back and our job is about we, we first of all recognize that the way we're going to get to a net zero planet, which is the ultimate goal, is primarily through enterprises. Governments are not going to get there and I think we know now it's even harder than we thought a couple years ago. Asking consumers to change their consumption of energy is a no go. Asking the developing world to reduce the consumption when they're trying to catch up with us is not fair.
- [23:12]
B
Trying to survive.
- [23:13]
A
Yeah. So what we're left with is enterprises which really are responsible for 90 plus percent of all emissions. Because ultimately everything comes from an enterprise, whether it's an energy enterprise, whether it's a transportation enterprise, manufacturing, hospitality, whatever it is. Unless it's a state owned energy company which are fewer today than it was. That's the thing. So when you go into the enterprise, what's the cause of emissions? 70 to 80% of it is a supply chain Apple. Like the emissions in their building, it's tiny compared to what they have in their supply chain to build iPhones. And so we look at that and say there's an opportunity for two things that can make impact as well as make business sense. Because in the next couple years no one's going to add cost, you know that there's headwinds to that and there's no political reason to do that. And the two things are efficiency and resilience. So McKinsey did a study and said if we could go 100% on all the efficiency that we need in the enterprises, we could get 30 to 40% of the way there's on a net zero planet just through efficiency. So that's what I call low hanging fruit for the next couple of years.
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B
We've been working on that for, for that many years at least with the smart meters and things like that to manage grid optimization.
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A
Yeah, there's way more and I'll get into that. And then the second is resilience. So in the past, so now bad weather's here, floods are here, hurricanes are here, disasters are here. And some people still argue that it's not caused by humans. It's, who cares? It's still here and you need to deal with it. Right. And that's crazy that they don't think that, but so what's happened is that there was a murky ROI on a resilience investment. It's now on average like 4 to 1 ROI on it. And if you look at the math, we're about spending about 10% of what we need to over the next 10 years on resilience. And resilience is like protected from floods, wildfires, brownouts, like so much that you need to do and things we hear.
- [25:23]
B
About on headlines every week it seems.
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A
It'S every week and it's like, yeah, there were storms before, but every storm is like triple the intensity of where it was. And it's happening in red states like Texas, so no one's immune. And so how can we spend on resilience so then if I take a step back and say, but wait a second, we're venture capital. What we're good at is high growth companies with high margin. So what should we be focused on? And our background is software and Internet. And so where we come to is the big two mega trends that will get us the biggest bang for the buck on efficiency and resilience is AI and robotics. So we're investing in AI and robotics companies that drive efficiency or resilience. And I can give you some examples, please. So solar is still happening despite the incentives, especially large scare solar on the utility scale. We have like an eight year backlog on the amount of solar we need to construct. One of the issues on the backlog is labor to put those panels on takes a lot of people and you're building massive solar farms. And so there's a team that is a robotics team, a field robotics team. Field robotics means a robot operating the real world, which is way harder than operating in a factory because anything can happen. Like a self driving car is the extreme example. And so this is out of Carnegie Mellon, which is where I went to school. I met them and they figured out a way to 3x solar farm construction through placing panels using a field robot. And rather than trying to recreate the entire process of creating a solar farm, they just went after the hardest thing with a simple robot. And they took an off the shelf base, wheeled base, and they took an off the shelf robotic arm that was weatherproof, stuck it on and used AI. So that when they went out to the top five engineering firms that were building solar farms, they had all tried robotics and it failed before. But with AI today, deep learning, they went out and did a pilot in each of them and beat the goals by double what they told the companies that they were going to do every single one. And they had different environments each time because the robot learned in real time, which is a huge difference.
- [27:43]
B
In the past, the field robotics, I was involved in a company that was doing robotic welding. What does a field robot look like in comparison? Is it more machine like or is it more human like?
- [27:53]
A
So a field robot is usually a wheeled robot because, you know, there's. Humanoids are not there yet. They'll happen, but they're not today. It has a wheel base and it's operating outside. And whereas a welding machine is typically, it's a, it's an arm that's solid, that's fixed and you're just going on a assembly line and welding stuff. It's a lot harder to do field robots because the weather changes, it could be muddy, there's wind, all that stuff. There's a lot more movement, and there's movement and there's people walking around. And so the robot has to sense everything, build a safety container around it, and execute the job at a fast pace. So that's one example. Another example of efficiency is we invested in efficiency is we invested in a company that has a really. It's like a Palantir. And you, you probably know Palantir, they're doing really well right now. And what they do is they create a simulation engine of an entire business, this word that's used called digital twin. But they target it towards, for example, there's an Indonesian oil and gas company that's really large, and they need to upgrade their infrastructure to do that. They go raise a bond. They raise billions. Well, the bond buyers are now saying, how are you going to address the future? Oil and gas is not forever, especially outside of America. And they say so. So what happens is that they would create a simulation, a digital twin of the entire infrastructure of the soil and gas companies and show what the investment could do towards changing some of that infrastructure towards sustainable aviation, fuel, hydrogen, what are the other things that they can put into their pipeline infrastructure? And they build a really credible model. But instead of hiring McKinsey or Bain and taking two months and building a static spreadsheet, they have a living simulation engine that uses AI to predict, and they can have everyone fuss with it in the company and come up with an answer. And then they staple that to the bond offering and they get a percentage of the bond offering. Fascinating. So that's an example where we're using AI to accelerate the move towards decarbonization. And it's really necessary.
- [30:09]
B
Hey, so we were, we were talking about how the AI is progressing and making a difference.
- [30:15]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I would say that there's kind of a base level of learning that's happened now, what we're getting. And I would say that we're seeing a slowdown. As far as you think about ChatGPT 5, I'm sure you've tried, versus 4, and there's a little bit of a difference, but it's not the big breakthrough that was there between 1, 2 and 3 and 4. But that's the digital world. There's a whole new part of AI called physical AI, which is how recent video. Yeah. How do you use sensors. Yes. To interpret and predict and manage the physical world, which is very different than reading a paper and summarizing it or creating a video. Yeah. So that is the opportunity that we have. And so we're looking at a vertical.
- [31:07]
B
Opportunity or horizontal opportunity.
- [31:09]
A
So it is a horizontal opportunity because the physical world manifests itself in so many different ways. There's like, how do you deal with underwater? Like I'm looking at. Or I'm looking at a company that has figured out how to way to map pipes and storm drains for resilience and figure out where, predict where the pipe is going to rupture in a store, in a flood as an example. And they're using AI, but part of what they're doing is going underground. It's really difficult. You can't use gps. You've got to come out with a new way to do underground mapping and location. So those are examples of the physical world that are just starting to be solved by entrepreneurs. And there's layers on that. Like there's. Does someone create a generic model of physics and then we can attach to that. Is there someone who has mastered just the dexterity of a hand, which is really hard and it was almost impossible back before deep learning. And then they could take what their mastery is and apply it to any factory floor. So someone can put on a glove and do something and then this robot can come and mimic it, but not just mimic it exactly. If the conditions change, it will know how to alter itself to do that. So there's just a huge number of startups from software to hardware, different layers of the stack that are all going after physical AI. And probably the most exciting one that people talk about is humanoids. Yeah, super hard problem. I believe that we're going to be on a thirty thousand dollar humanoid that's going to be there and it's just, it's just fantastic. But I think we're still probably five to ten years away, but we're making advances towards it.
- [32:58]
B
I want to follow all these conversations to go deeper. I'm already a few minutes over time with you, but I'd like to do a soft pivot if I may. Your background is just so unique. The combination of venture and entrepreneurship and looking at all these different issues and such that you have this cohort of dozens of companies right now. What is it that you share with them? Raj, you're a bit of a management guru also. What is it you share with them that they view as they feel is most helpful, that you see really making a difference, that sort of a void in what they bring to the table that you help coach them up? I don't imagine it's things like industry knowledge or tech knowledge. Even though quite a lot there. I would think it's probably a combination of some of the softer skills with some of the experience wrapped around it. But, but coach me up.
- [33:54]
A
What do you. Yeah.
- [33:54]
B
What do you share with entrepreneurs? Because that's a lot of my audience.
- [33:58]
A
Yeah. So there's a couple things. First is peripheral vision. The job of an investor is because we're. You're busy executing. Are we seeing threats or opportunities that are in your peripheral vision that we could bring to the bear? Because we're looking at a broad, broad view of what's going on. Most importantly, it's around. There are so many decisions and so many things you could do as an entrepreneur. What are the things you're not going to do and where are the talent holes that are there? And when they hire talent, they don't have experience in hiring, like usually a VP of marketing or something. So how can we help? Surround them with people that can help them understand what's an A player versus a B player? Because the old adage, an A player attracts a B player tracks C player, C player attracts D players. You know, that whole thing. And then I would say, when do you put down the accelerator versus when do you take off the accelerator? Because we have a deep understanding of the environment, financing and things like that. So then there's a whole layer of personal growth. And how do you know what your patterns are that you're bringing from your childhood, you're bringing from your past experience and be aware of it so that you can manage and lead better. And can we put you in touch with some coaches that can help you through that? So I would say a good investor is going to do like a 360, which is what's the peripheral vision? When do I help me? The entrepreneur is going to have an instinct around when I put the accelerator and the decelerator. And we're going to be able to provide some context in that instinct because we can look at the outside world and say, well, actually the next round is going to be harder than you think, given what's going on in the world. Or it's going to, this is the time, let's go. Like, let's do it. And then when it comes to a pivot, it's about helping them think through around what are the different options and avenues that they have. But ultimately the decision is really the CEO. It's not my place to make that decision. And then around talent, it's around helping them find the best talent and the Hardest thing is knowing what an A player is. And for example, I'll bring in an advisor who's an A VP of sales. They don't want to leave their job, but they would advise and they would help in interview some candidates so that you can get the right view of what is an A player is one example.
- [36:13]
B
You're in favor of bringing in these advisor consultants to act as either mentors, coaches or get things started.
- [36:20]
A
Yes, and I would say not consultants necessarily, but advisors that can help you get the right frame. Because a lot of when you're in a high growth situation is constantly up leveling your team and the only way you can uplevel is if you know what you're trying to uplevel. Right.
- [36:36]
B
So a specific question. Does that CEO need to be the the top recruiter, the top fundraiser, the top salesperson as a lot of people suggest? Because I would imagine a few CEOs feel intimidated to learn all those skills because they're an engineer with a master's degree from a top school or they just have a product geekness about them that may not be the same type of skills. You need to be that top recruiter or the best at fundraising or selling the vision. How do you feel about that?
- [37:13]
A
Yeah, that's a really good question. And here's what I've over 20 plus years have come to my conclusion. We love technical founders because they can build product and they can execute. However, if the technical founder is only interested in technology and is the CEO, it's usually not going to work. What we're looking for is a technical founder. That is what I would call a systems thinker. They are loving engineering and product, but they want to apply the same systems thinking skills to marketing, to sales, to fundraising and they have a desire and a curiosity versus a fear to do that. So for example, I had a really strong technical founder who was like I think we can do a better way of doing sales and applied their prodigious brain to figuring out what's a different incentive structure we can have, what's the type of person we want to hire. And they went in and went deep into that. Even at Uber. Travis Kalanick for On the positive and this is Elon does this too is can go deep dive for like hours upon hours into a particular problem and try to help solve it. Because they're systems thinkers and they try to really. So that is critical for the CEO. So my question is if they just want technology, they should just be a cto.
- [38:44]
B
So my question is if you engage with a super technical founder. Super. But they're great at it and they're deep into it, but not quite the systems thinker. Will you still take a chance at them and, and find it that you feel confident that you can teach them the systems thinking by series A or.
- [39:04]
A
Whatever amount of time? Yeah, there's a. It's a really good question. There's a nuance there. I want to. When I'm looking at backing them, I want to know that they really want it, not that they have to be convinced that they see the value in it and that they've already started to do it. If there's a starting point, they're doing it, they want it, then we can surround them with the people to help them. I'll give you an example. When I was at Mayfield, early in the day, I was working with Chamath, he was working with us, and he's now Spac King and all these other things. And he knew this guy, Mark Zucker. Zuckerberg, who's running a small company called Facebook at the time. And he's like, let's bring them in to speak to some students that we gathered at Mayfield. And Mark was not a great speaker, but he was a systems thinker and he wanted to get better at everything. So he knew that speaking was a. Lacking skills, public speaking. So he went back and got coaching and has become, you know, you can argue about what he says, but he's a good, he knows how to do it now. And Logan's the same way at Lyft. You know, he's. He's a systems thinker and looks into the design of everything. So I think that's really critical. Sometimes there's like a duo of a CEO and a CEO, and the CEO is incredibly good at systems thinking and the CEO is very technical. But I would still argue that the tough decisions are going to come to the CEO and they, they can't shy away with it and just outsource it. I've passed on a number of CEOs that are incredible technically, but I didn't think could scale systems. Interesting.
- [40:43]
B
Were you validated with your decisions at this point?
- [40:46]
A
So far, yeah. So far, yeah. And if I look at the ones I tried to go after, I tried to go after Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, all of those at the C level when I was at Mayfield and I saw the systems thinking skills in each of those CEOs.
- [41:01]
B
This is another book. I don't know if you have to pitch it to Dave or you write it yourself, but I Love this theme.
- [41:08]
A
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.
- [41:10]
B
As well as a lot of the other topics we covered, this has been really enjoyable for me, and I'm gonna hit you up for some more thoughts and ideas down the road. But I appreciate you taking a little bit of time. I know you got a lot of things going on around you. I want to just also say, personally, I look to interview people on my podcast. I've done about a hundred of these where people are tied to sharing ideas and paying it forward kind of. But also have an idea about how we make things better with a social impact layer to all. To all of their efforts. You know, so it's one thing to make GPS turn into profits and LPs into, you know, more. More dollars, but there's a lot more value in. In having that greater social impact, too.
- [41:54]
A
Yeah. I think we're seeing now more than ever that there. It's not an either or. You can really go after it. And I think one thing I'll leave you with. Stanford did a survey, I think it was last year, of what kind of career you're most interested in going after. These are the top people in engineering, and 85 or 90% of them were looking at something with impact, and most of them were around climate. But applying AI. AI is hot, but they were thinking about how they can apply it. So I. I'm very positive and hopeful with the younger generation who has embraced this fully.
- [42:33]
B
Thanks for leaving me on a positive note, Raj. There's so much other clouds and crosswinds and everything else, but I really appreciate. We'll keep. We'll keep our fingers crossed and try to make some of that happen.
- [42:44]
A
Thank you. Great to talk to you, Keith. Take care. Thanks.
- [42:47]
B
Tremendous.